Suzanne Braun Levine's life in feminism

Suzanne Braun Levine's new book urges women to embrace their real age. As she turns 65, the pioneering editor of Ms magazine tells Emma Brockes how her own brutal abortion inspired her to follow a life in feminism

Suzanne Braun Levine ... 'My doctor father couldn't get his friends to give me an abortion. They were scared.' Photograph: Nathan Ellis Perkel/Rapport

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 3 August 2009

The article below referred to a D and C as "dilation and cutterage". That should have been curettage – surgical scraping with a curette; in this case, scraping of the womb.

When Suzanne Braun Levine turned 65, she looked back with annoyance at the pressure she had felt "since 50" to appear 20 years younger than she was. Despite the current debates in the UK about older women disappearing from our TV screens, most women in her age bracket were, she believed, "very happy" with where they were. That is in something she calls Second Adulthood, like First Adulthood, but with more security and turtlenecks – the turtlenecks she considers a minor drawback. Now Levine, who was a pioneering editor at Ms magazine, is urging her peers to "throw away the script" and realise the advantages of late middle-age in a way that inspires and terrifies, as capitalised entreaties to Have Fun will do.

While Levine was growing up there was only one template for women over 50 – invisibility – and she says women of her generation still feel guilty for not conforming. "They think they're crazy. They say, 'I'm happy, what's wrong with me? I should be skydiving, I should be leaving my job, leaving my husband.'" In her book 50 is the New Fifty, Levine provides a set of life lessons designed to liberate her peers from any lingering sense of obligation, even if that obligation is to do something radical. "We often don't have the confidence to reject what everyone else is doing, when it seems totally inappropriate for us. Women are always looking for agendas to follow and roles to play, because we spent so much time learning scripts. And the instinct to find a script pushes us towards feeling inadequate".

A self-help book which advises readers not to follow too much advice is by necessity a messy enterprise. Join a group, writes Levine, or quit a group. Take risks; alternatively "dare to be conservative." Travel, don't travel. Change jobs, or not. Don't be afraid to say no. Or yes. Above all, "go for it!" All those perky activities deemed suitable for people over a certain age – tango lessons, researching a family tree, outward bound courses – are listed with what I suppose is a helpful lack of scorn, or endorse-ment; meanwhile those with more ambition might consider becoming a movie star. If further evidence were needed of the paucity of "templates" for older women, there it is: the inevitable reference to Helen Mirren, three pages in.

Levine lives in Manhattan with her husband and shines with enthusiasm, an advertisement for the theory of extending one's prime. Until she read Ms magazine in the early 70s she had, she says, been politically unaware and more or less "obedient". She was leafing through the magazine one day when she saw an item that cut clean through her. Ms was launched as a feminist issue within New York magazine, edited by Gloria Steinem, and after stunning the publishers by selling out instantaneously, became a regular title. The item Levine saw fell under the headline I Have Had An Abortion and was, simply, a list of famous women offering their names in the campaign to decriminalise the procedure. Beneath the list a coupon invited readers to send in their own names. "I saw that coupon," says Levine, "and the way good movement activism works. I didn't even have to ask myself. I thought: that's for me." She committed to the cause and later became the editor of Ms.

The experience that provoked her to act was her own "horrific abortion". At the age of 22 she got pregnant and although she was the daughter of middle-class New Yorkers who supported her decision, and her own father was a doctor, there was still no solution. "My father couldn't get his friends to give his daughter an abortion. They were scared. They would take away your licence if that happened." Eventually, the family found an abortionist who performed the procedure brutally in a hotel room. "First he inserted sticks of seaweed. And then I went home and into agonising labour. And then you come back the next day and you've had a miscarriage, and he does a D and C [dilation and curettage – the scraping out of the uterus] without anaesthesia. And my father, who's a very dignified man, handed over the money and the guy reached out his hand. My father wouldn't shake his hand. I'll never forget that."

Roe v Wade was passed in 1974 and for a short while, says Levine, she and her fellow activists were confident that abortion was an issue feminism could put beyond debate. Thirty-five years later and the assassination of the abortion doctor Dr George Tiller makes her shake her head in amazement. This week Scott Roeder, who is accused of murdering the man who became a hate-figure for anti-abortionists in the US went on trial. Recalling women's options in the 70s Levine says, "There was a doctor outside Philadelphia who was known to do them. A lot of people went to Puerto Rico. And that's where we still are."

Yet she says the most important issue of the moment is the endlessly circular debate about work/life balance. Almost 10 years ago Levine lobbied men to take a greater role in their families at a time when fathers who went with their children to the park were occasionally assumed to be paedophiles. She is hopeful that an effect of the financial crisis might be the increased involvement of men in their children's lives. "So many are out of work, it's changing the experience of walking down the street. You see a whole lot more men with a teddy bear under their arm and a double stroller. The number of men fully integrated into the grubby day-to-day stuff of their children's lives has gone up."

Part of the work/life problem, perhaps, is that the notion of curtailing one's career to raise children was so thoroughly despised. Did her generation of feminists over-correct the example of their stay-at-home mothers? "There was never any political sense that women who stay at home are making the wrong choice. But it definitely became a mindset. And I think one of the reasons that Ms didn't speak up for those women effectively, was because none of us were those women. There was always this sense – they're different. It's possible that some of the young women who are leaving high-paid careers to stay home are reacting against their mother's being so committed to their work. A lot of them have said, 'You weren't a good mother, you were never home.'" She smiles. "I think basically people always say their mothers weren't good mothers. There's always a reason."

Levine's own daughter is 23 and on a year out in Buenos Aires. She has, she says, none of the anxieties of her generation. Levine recalls playing basketball at school at a time when the girls' team was restricted to half the court – the full court was considered too tiring. They weren't encouraged to play too ferociously – something she can't imagine her daughter putting up with. "It was unladylike to be too aggressive."

Unlike some older feminists she does not lecture young women on when to have children or berate them for their attitude to feminism. "We had a war. And they don't. There were battle fronts. There was combat. It was much clearer. The issues now are much more fuzzy because the universe has expanded so much. There are lots of arguments that older feminists make – one, I guess, that women abuse the charge of sexism and another that they are diluting [employment law] victory by taking time off after having a baby and then not going back. And a lot of older feminists are mad because the younger ones don't have a really activist agenda. But every generation has to define their own issues."

And yet, more generally, if there is one thing she hopes her generation will do for younger women, it is set them an example they themselves were denied. "I certainly assumed that age meant decrepitude and dottiness. And I don't think my daughter's going to think that".